Sample replies? Best course of action to take?

[stinger]

Since last September they had threatened to sue you in 90 days, they must be very busy if they wasted so much time before threatening to sue you again.  What are they busy doing?

Did you check out the law firm as Robert suggested?  Do they specialize in digital image law, or are they ambulance chasers?  If the latter, they are likely trolls and will not sue.  I would expect that since they are contacting you by email, they might be trolls because they can't be sure their email got through spam filters and the like.

Did you check out the picture registration personally?  Robert gives good advice when it comes down to these kinds of details.  Don't trust what they put it front of you.  Make sure it's registered.  And did you find where the writer sourced the picture?  If the photographer put the photo on a creative commons site, they will likely not sue you.

[The-Gobbler]

Yeah, neither the firm nor the "client" come up in any searches that this site suggests so they're either new to this racket or something else. They did indeed send what they claim was proof of an image on my domain that matched something their client holds a copyright to. Of course, in good faith, I simply deleted it as soon as I got the first letter so I can only verify that there was something vaguely similar not that it was actually the client's image.

I find it kind of funny that people think regular mail is more reliable than email, but, whatever works.  Anyway, it wasn't even me who supposedly took this image, rather it was simply a user of my platform who probably got it from somewhere with bad/no documentation. We explicitly prohibit users from posting copywritten material.  As such, I'm fairly certain that I'm protected by DMCA and so on. 

But you know, I'm paranoid.  These people are pretty shameless.

[Robert Krausankas (BuddhaPi)]

google search the firm and the client.

[The-Gobbler]

Cool, thanks.  Well I guess I still would love to do the protection letter which I was hoping we had done months ago, but Oscar never responded.  If he reads this, hopefully we can get it going.  It's probably overkill, but you know, peace of mind!

[Robert Krausankas (BuddhaPi)]

contact his office directly if you want to do the letter program.